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In my previous post I showed how to use Raspberry Pi to automatically record MIDI files from digital piano whenever you turn it on. However, if you sit down and play for an hour, and get one big MIDI file, it is not very useful. So what to do?

Pianoteq has a feature that splits your playing session based on breaks you take between playing notes. So I decided to mimick this feature with a simple Python script that:

Keeps tab on keys and pedals pressed

Whenever X seconds elapse without any keys or pedals down, a new MIDI file is started

Additionally, if user presses and releases sustain pedal several times in the end, filename for that MIDI is altered to “highlight” that file

I first thought to learn enough of MIDI file format to do everything from scratch, but there’s quite a bit of small details to handle, so in the end I decided to use an external toolkit from Craig Stuart Sapp called midifile to do the heavy lifting. You should be able to just clone the Git repo and make it with Raspberry Pi:

You should now have two useful commands in ~/midifile/bin: toascii to read a MIDI file and dump an ASCII (text) version of it, and tobinary to do the reverse. With Python’s Popen and smart piping, we can read and write the binary MIDI files as they were in this text format. You can check out how the format looks like with some MIDI file you have:

~/midifile/bin/toascii somemidi.mid | less

Here’s a sample of a MIDI file recorded by arecordmidi (I added the note in square brackets):

There’s some header data in the beginning, and each MIDI event is comprised of a deltatime field starting with ‘v’, and then fairly standard MIDI events in straightforward syntax. I hardcoded my program to expect single track which starts with tempo and speed data (ff 51 and ff 58 lines) which I use to calculate how many deltatime units is one second. I copy this header part to start of every MIDI file, and append the final “ff 2f v0” (END TRACK) event to the end. Here’s the full code:Continue reading Split MIDI Files with Python